It didn’t quite work out how I planned: At the end of the week, I found out I hadn’t matched with my preferred houses. But I muddled through the rest of the semester and started to find my footing. Despite some lingering disappointment, I tried again during fall rush my sophomore year.
The smell of hazelnut filling my nose as I clutched my morning latte on the way to class. The din of lacrosse practice sneaking through the glass of my Phibbs Hall dorm window. The feeling of damp wool socks sliding around inside my Birkenstocks. The calming, omnipresent sight of ivy blanketing the campus as if it were protecting us from the outside world. Puget Sound was a beautiful bubble from the harsh realities that lay ahead. It was, in the truest sense, how it felt to be safe.
I was thrilled to get a job there as a sophomore, first as a French tutor and then — by my junior year — as a writing advisor. I could not have anticipated how holistically the CWL would change my life. In our first semester as employees, tutors were required to take an additional course that taught us about potential internal biases, ways of learning, and methods or meeting people where they are in their academic journeys so that we could best serve as many students as possible.
KUPS, Puget Sound’s nationally recognized campus radio station, has always had a countercultural streak, playing music well outside the Top 40 and giving airtime to voices you don’t typically hear on commercial radio. So, it may come as no surprise that the station itself arose from a prank. In the spring of 1966, first-year Rockwell Smith ’69 and a few co-conspirators hijacked the carillon system — normally used to broadcast the sound of bells — to play seven-and-a-half minutes of sound effects, including a cacophony of train whistles and car horns.
When most people look out at the ocean, they see a vast, nearly empty expanse of water. Associate Professor of Biology Oscar Sosa sees something more dynamic and mysterious. To him, the ocean is “a soup of microbes and organic molecules doing all kinds of things together and independently.” This year, Sosa and five former University of Puget Sound students co-authored a paper in Nature Microbiology alongside collaborators at the University of Washington and Whitman College outlining a newly discovered metabolic pathway used by marine organisms.
A Girl Scout outing set Cindy Rogers on her path to a career in occupational therapy.
“I was an avid Girl Scout through high school,” recalls Rogers, who grew up in small-town Utah. “One year we did career study.”
That included a visit to a Utah state facility for people with disabilities, where Rogers had a chance to observe an occupational therapist in action.
“The minute I saw her doing her thing, I said, ‘This is me.’ In junior high, I knew I wanted to be an OT.”
Every career is a journey — and no two paths are alike. Always a Logger is a podcast from the University of Puget Sound and the Puget Sound Alumni Council about the winding path to success and the many ways Logger alumni find personal and professional fulfillment after graduation. The first season is now available to watch on YouTube or you can listen on your favorite podcast player.
The defining variable in the rapid rise of autonomous artificial intelligence may not be a background in computer engineering, but rather the critical thinking skills obtained by a liberal arts education, according to a panel of industry experts convened as part of the recent University of Puget Sound Business Insights event.
